In which a pilot and author inflicts her opinions on the world….

Category Archives: Sexism

There’s one of the guys at work that started a Tie Tuesday thing. He said he was tired of being asked what the hell are you dressed up for when he’d wear one for an interview, so he wanted to normalize it, and started wearing a tie every Tuesday.

I decided being a woman was no reason for me to be left out of Tie Tuesday. After all, there’s lots of jobs – some of them in aviation to boot – where I might, as a woman be required to wear a uniform that included a tie, and thus, technically, neckties have become gender neutral to an extent.

To an extent. When I decided to raid the closet for one of my husband’s ties that matched the collared shirt I was wearing, and head to work, I didn’t think it was going to be as big a deal as it was.

First, the husband wouldn’t give me a kiss goodbye. He might take some time to get used to it.

At work, it was a hit. The vast majority of people smiled and said it was awesome. I was some kind of spectacle; I might as well have been dressed up as Deadpool. And yet, it didn’t look ridiculous, there was nothing inappropriate about it, and everyone was intelligent enough to realize it wasn’t technically a social transgression.

One interesting observation was the odd one who made a point of pretending not to notice. They would look, and I could tell they noticed, and there was a split second of confusion as they tried to figure out how they were supposed to react before they decided the safest response was no response. I imagine because they weren’t sure if it was some kind of trans thing, and it was a workplace that’s very openly supportive of LGBT rights, and no one wants to come off as intolerant. One of those was the project manager as we washed out hands in the ladies room. I diffused the awkwardness by explaining it was Tie Tuesday, and that one of the guys had started it, and I decided there was no reason I shouldn’t participate. She smiled and said it was awesome, and that it should totally be a thing.

Now my trans friend is going to send me all her old ties she doesn’t plan on wearing anymore!

In conclusion – it was fun, and I think it was a good look on me. There seems to be a lot less pushback to women adopting masculine things than there is to men adopting feminine things, and that’s simply because the feminine is (wrongly) devalued and scorned, and people don’t understand why men would want to be that. In contrast they can completely understand why women would want to become more masculine – masculine is seen as positive. I’m at a point where I’m becoming comfortable thinking of myself as gender-fluid, in the sense that I don’t conform to societal gender norms, though I don’t feel uncomfortable in my own skin. I still like to do the feminine thing sometimes, and mix and match the feminine things with the masculine as I please where it comes to makeup and clothes and interests. I go all out with makeup when I feel like it, but mostly don’t wear any at all most days. I pair feminine tops with cargo pants. I sew and garden, and I fly aeroplanes. If that makes me gender-fluid, then okay. Maybe someday we’ll live in a world where what I am is just normal and doesn’t need a label.

PS: I have advised the co-worker who started Tie Tuesday that this weekend I’m kicking off Skirt Saturday.

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I’ve dealt with sexism a lot in the line of work I’ve been in for the last 9 years. That being technical support over the phone. I’m good at what I do. I get higher than average customer service scores, but I still get little old ladies that I overhear whispering to their spouses that “The boys do seem to know a little better than the women when it comes to these things” while I’m troubleshooting something with them. I’ve had women get on the phone and tell me without me saying anything but “Thank you for calling, my name is Lindsay, how may I help you?” that they didn’t want to speak to me, they wanted to speak to a man. And it’s always women saying these things. I’m sure the men think it, and it’s probably the reason I get more resistance from men as well as women than do my male colleagues, but they won’t say it out loud. I get called “Honey” and “Sweetie” by men on the phone. I think I got a marriage proposal once, or he might have just promised to come to my wedding, I can’t remember. That was when I fixed his TV after he swore at me for a half an hour.

Anyway, I’ve had a request for thoughts on my experiences being a female pilot. Well so far it’s not near so bad as being a female in tech support. But then, so far, I’m not dealing with the public. Like in tech support, my fellow pilots don’t doubt my abilities. Or, well, if they do, it’s legitimate because I’m still pretty new to it. I may have my licence, but I’m about as skilled a pilot as a kid that just got their drivers licence. They’re fine to drive as long as they’re careful and pay attention to what they’re doing, but you don’t so much want to see them headed straight for downtown in the big city the moment the papers are signed. They joke that you have a “license to learn” but it’s not really a joke. But that’s not sexism.

But fellow pilots have not treated me with any disrespect. In fact, it seems like once you get into aviation, fellow pilots crawl out of the woodwork, almost – people you knew a long time, but didn’t know they’d had their private licence at one point. And they’re all automatically your friend. One of the first people to encourage me to pursue it was one of the guys at work. When he mentioned he’d done a private license, and I wistfully commented how much I’d love to learn to fly, he said, well there’s a school I hear is good, you should go check it out, and suddenly it was a real thing, not abstract wishing anymore. There was a place, and a name of a school, and a person who it didn’t occur to him to think I couldn’t do it.

And then there was my dad, with his worrying that no one would hire me because I’m a woman. This is a man, keep in mind, who has been self employed his entire life, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know what the phrase “affirmative action” means. He did agree to help me with co-signing student loans, though, so I like to think that his little outburst was a panicked oh-god-my-little-girl-is-going-out-to-do-something-dangerous-but-I-can’t-admit-I’m-worried-for-her-safety thing.

So, among people who know aeroplanes, things have been pretty amicable, short of one of the newer dispatchers asking me what he could do for me, in a way that made me think he thought I must be lost despite me walking confidently and purposefully toward the plane I was about to check out and take flying. But he might have said that to anyone he didn’t recognize – I can’t say, so I give people the benefit of the doubt.

Of course, my experiences so far are going to be coloured by two main things.

First, that I’m still in flight school and 99% of my interactions are with people getting paid to be nice to me. Not that I think any of them don’t believe in me as much as they do my fellow male students. It’s just when someone says, “Well obviously they’ll say that, they’re making money off of you,” I can’t deny that’s true.

The other thing I have to keep in mind is that St. Andrews recently won the title of “most female friendly airport”. It would be kind of sad if I were to be training at an airport with a title like that (and I understand Harv’s air was very much involved in that) and got slammed with sexism at every turn. So I also have to recognise that my experiences at St. Andrews may very well be more welcoming than at other airports.

So a lot of the anecdotes of sexism I know of come from other pilots. One, Cessna Chick, had a post one day about the reaction she got from some friends when she told them she was taking flight training. She’s dating a pilot, and these were the girlfriends and wives of his pilot friends, and their reaction was to smile and say “Oh, I went through that phase too.” Ugh.

The female instructors I’ve talked to all laugh about older male student who, the first time they showed up for lessons with them asked, “So where’s the instructor?” Sandra also told me about people asking her what she does for a living. When she says “I fly aeroplanes,” they have a tendency to answer “Oh, that must be exciting. What does your husband think of that?”

I’m sure I’ll get more of this stuff in the future. When I do, I’ll know how to deal with it – I’ve dealt with it before in tech support. But so far it’s been great. I’ve never been in such a supportive environment in my life.

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All my life I’ve been surrounded by women who are ashamed to have anyone know how old they are, and the old cliche that a woman’s age should be secret, that there’s something disgraceful about the passage of time for a woman. And when I said I wasn’t going to dye my hair when it started to turn grey, and that I was going to be proud of my age, they all said, oh, you’ll feel different when you get there.

Not sure what age that “when you get there” is supposed to be, but societal norms certainly tell me that thirty is one of those pivotal moments when I’m supposed to feel old. So it’s kind of timely that this amusing moment happened the other day:

We had pulled the Citabria up to the fuel pump, and one of the dispatchers came to fuel it up. He didn’t wait for us to get out, just pulled the 1500lb+ plane forward with both of us in it. I made a comment about him being a manly man. Sandra made a comment about us being a pair of cougars.

I was like, wait, what? I’m not old enough to be….wait a minute, how old is he?

Turns out he’s nineteen. A full ten years younger than me. And it doesn’t even matter that I wasn’t even actually flirting – I’m married, after all. I was surprised he even heard me over the wind and engines of the other planes.

It ended up being pretty funny – the dispatcher was killing himself laughing. Which is fine – I can handle humour being at my expense. With friends, I’ve set myself up to be the butt of jokes sometimes, just because my friends are clever and the jokes will be entertaining, so I was laughing as hard as he was.

But it was still a bit of a shock. I mean, I kind of had the feeling I was around that age that people talk about. That age that society dictates that I should be ashamed and hide my age. That age that they all told me I’d feel different about it than I did when I was “younger.”

And you know what? I do feel different about it. But not the way they said I would. They said I would feel embarrassed and ashamed to be as old as I am. Well that’s not how I feel. I feel annoyed at society’s silly expectations, and ready to flip them the bird.

I’m twenty-nine and eleven months, and I don’t need anyone to think I’m under twenty five to rock my life, so anyone who thinks otherwise can suck it.

So there.

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So, basically I’d be soloing pretty much now, if it weren’t for waiting on my medical, which is waiting on a doctor’s appointment, so that I can get a referral to a psychiatrist, so I can get a psych report to send them. *le sigh* That could take weeks, and already has, but I have a doctor’s appointment on Monday at least.

I’ve only flown two days this week, but I still have to study for the PSTAR (student pilot exam), so a bit of extra time helps with that, plus I worked Sunday and Tuesday. Then today we got grounded by fog, so we did ground work, learning about precautionary and forced landings, and navigation.

Flying was more circuits this week, but Sandra says I’m pretty much good on landings and ready to move on to something else. That last flight on Wednesday, I got a couple of really good ones in a row, convincing her I’d caught on to the flare thing. We also did runway changes on Wednesday early morning. When the circuit’s busy, runway changes requested by an instructor for their student to practice can be a hassle for ATC. At 8:30 am, at a small airport, with no one in the circuit, it’s a license for ATC to have some fun with you. He had us doing 180 degree turns to land on the same runway we just took off from, for a touch and go in the opposite direction.

Oh, and the trend of my instructor pushing me to the edge of my abilities continues. On Monday, my instructor said, “By the way, I should warn you; now that you’re getting the hang of things, every once in a while, I’m gonna randomly try and kill you.” (It went something like that, anyway – and I totally need to work that line into my novel; I know exactly the character to utter it.) Then in a climb after a touch and go, she pulled the throttle to idle and said “Okay, where ya gonna land?” (We didn’t actually do a forced landing at that point – she just had me check around and pick an acceptable place that we could have landed. We will be doing actual forced landings away from our home airfield soon, and we did do a couple forced/power off landings from mid circuit where we could still make the runway.)

I should talk about the people in aviation too. Sandra, my instructor, is, as I’ve said before, awesome, I don’t feel self conscious around her at all. But it’s not just her. I’ve been told by people familiar with both, that the aviation industry is like the horse lover’s community – tight knit and everyone knows one another. That worried me, because I don’t do well in cliquish sorts of environments, but it hasn’t been like that at all. I suppose it could still just be the school I’m going to, and the sort of people who hang out at the restaurant at the school, but so far everyone I’ve talked to has been welcoming and helpful, whether they were employed by the school or not. While I sit in the restaurant studying, random people with no actual affiliation with Harv’s Air, have stopped by, asked me where I’m at in my training, and told me if I ever need advice or help with anything, to just ask.

I was talking to one older gentleman and the topic of sexism came up, and he expressed frustration at the favouritism shown to women by the government, professing that the sexism it’s meant to counter doesn’t exist in aviation. I don’t have the experience to say for certain how close to the mark he is, and of course I have to take into consideration that he’s a man and will have never been subject to the sexism that I have. But he told me a story about a time when a young woman he was training accused him of failing her because she was female, and he went to his records to point out that he’d failed a higher percentage of males than he ever had females. I’d like to believe that I’m going into an industry where I’ll be judged based on my abilities un-coloured by my gender. I hope it’s true. I suspect the reason that only 6% of people in aviation are female maybe not be because of discrimination coming from people within the industry, but rather because of attitudes and discouragement from people outside of the aviation community. It’s certainly been true for me. The influences that had stopped me from pursuing a career in aviation were entirely outside the aviation community – once involved in aviation, there has been no one who hasn’t welcomed me and encouraged me (regardless of whether or not I was paying them).

Anyway, next week I only have two days of flying scheduled, and a couple days of work, but I’m working on getting that medical straightened out, so wish me luck on getting a psych appointment quickly. That and I’ll be working on getting ready for the PSTAR exam, so that I’ll be ready to solo when the medical comes through.

This post is not at all writing related, but it’s about sexism and the ridiculous places it comes from sometimes.

I work in internet, TV and cell phone tech support, and sadly, today was not by a long shot the first time I’ve had such a call: Lady gets on the line, has already worked herself up into a tizzy, and when I answer, and give my name, she says she wants to speak to a technician.

I’m a technician, I say, I can help you.

And then she says “No offense” but she wants to speak to a man.

In the past I’ve argued with these people, and eventually got them to hang up, but I figured I’d try something different. After failing to assure this woman that I could help her as well as any man, I let her rant hoping I could get enough information to help her anyway (at my company, we’re often nice that way, even if you’re being a douche – our bosses like to see it, it’s a job — we’re professionals).

Then when I got a chance to talk, I told her I was sorry she’d had so much difficulty with her service, but (in a very firm and level voice, not my nicey nice voice) that I was indeed very much offended that she didn’t believe that I could help her because I was a woman.

It can be really fun calling people on bullshit – she backpedaled then and said she was sorry, she shouldn’t have said that. We’re Canadians, and if there’s anything we can’t abide, it’s offending people.

Again, it’s sad that I get this “I want to talk to a man” as often as I do. And I honestly don’t recall ever getting it from a man. That’s the screwy thing, it’s always women who will come out with that. I’ve talked to men who didn’t think I could help them, and I could tell they had been expecting and hoping to talk to a man, but they won’t say it out loud. Women will. We’re shooting ourselves in the female empowering foot, ladies, come on.

And I’ll let you in on a secret. Those ladies may think that the girl doing tech support isn’t as capable as the guy, but it’s actually likely to be the opposite, and I’ll tell you why. It’s not because women are smarter than men. No, it’s because of those closed minded individuals who give women such a hard time working in the industry (not my coworkers, not my supervisors – they know I know my shit – it’s the customers on the phone who lack faith in the XX chromosome). It’s because there is so much more tolerance from customers for a man who hasn’t a clue what he’s doing, than there is for a woman. Which means, the only women who stick around are the ones who *really* know what they’re doing. They’re typically above average in know-how in the call center, just because if they weren’t, they’d get twice the abuse a man would take.

And this is why it’s still hard to be a woman these days, with all the laws made to protect us from discrimination, there’s still the asshattery that laws can’t stop people from committing, and other women are just as guilty of holding us down as men.

*sigh* Going back to writing now. Gonna type out the edits on that chapter where the brothel madam complains about how men oppress her.